The Elephant in the Room
by PrairieDawn
Summary: Alex would just as soon the Doctor keep neglecting her education, thank you very much. Angsty, extremely geeky spackle. Follows "Quagmire"


Author's Note: Per usual, timeline is after Voyage of the Damned and before Partners in Crime. Within Alex Caron's tenure as a companion, this falls immediately after Quagmire, which is shelved with the crossovers because Nigel Marven is in it.

Warnings: obscure Nyssa reference, preteen angst, gratuitous ice cream consumption, gratuitous snarky reference to Dr. Phil, explicit telepathy.

Thanks to Spring at Teaspoon for beta reading.

* * *

The Elephant in the Room

Alex had gotten tired of wearing the two sets of clothing she had brought with her. Unfortunately, the Tardis wardrobe was not particularly well endowed with clothing for a girl her size. She found a pretty velvet and tulle outfit that might have fit, but when she tried it on was too big and made her look like a purple Tinkerbell. She finally found a pair of black leggings that would stay up if she pinned them, and paired them with a much too big blue t-shirt, made into a sort of dress with a bit of shiny silver fabric she tied around her waist like a belt. It was comfortable and not too silly looking, she hoped.

The Doctor found her at lunchtime, in the kitchen. She wondered if his alien ears could hear her heart jump in her chest with a banal terror that had been burrowing into her mind for days, much as she tried to pretend it wasn't there. She was sure that he knew anyway, he would have to know if he were paying the slightest bit of attention. They had been dancing around each other since they'd gotten back from the Carboniferous. Still, he smiled, and was kind, and made jokes, as if everything were okay. She spread hummus on a pita and piled cucumber salad on top. "Want some?" she asked.

"Looks good," he replied. She passed him a plate. "Have you always been a vegetarian, then?"

"You remembered! Yeah, a lot of us are," she said. "Not all."

"Us?" He scooped a little salad onto his plate.

"I'm a Friend. FGC." She tilted her head at his blank look, secretly pleased to have stumped him on some facet of human culture. "Friends General Conference?" Still no recognition. "I'm a Quaker."

"Are you really?" She wondered if he was actually interested, or was just trying to get her to talk.

She wobbled her head noncommittally. "On my Dad's side. My mom's Catholic. Unfortunately, they're not mutually exclusive."

"Unfortunately?" He stood up to fiddle with a kitchen appliance she hadn't yet been able to identify.

"We went to Mass and meeting right after. Made for a long Sunday. I stopped going to Mass when I got sick. Too crowded." She took a bite of hummus and salad.

"But you didn't stop going to meeting?" He punched a couple of buttons. "Milk and eggs OK?"

"What? Yeah." She found herself watching him, as if he might ambush her.

He set a bowl of something that she assumed to be chocolate ice cream in front of her. "You need the calories. Might as well enjoy getting them."

Alex took a bite of ice cream. It tasted like the expensive kind, Ben and Jerry's or something. "Small meeting," she explained. "We met in a member's house. I'd just sit in the back, by the door. Quaker meetings aren't like other kinds of church. You just sit and listen, and if you're moved to speak, you speak. It's okay if nobody says anything---doesn't usually happen, though. There was a woman at our meeting who always had something to say."

"Something worth breaking the silence for?"

"Sometimes. There was an old man who fell asleep most of the time. He snored." She skipped involuntarily through a string of associations, from snoring, to sleep, to dreaming, to her most recent nightmare, an old one from when she was little that had been popping back up to haunt her lately.

When she was six, she had climbed up the ladder to the high diving board. She had liked heights since infancy, had loved feeling the wind and being able to see the world spread out below her like a playset. She had peered off the end of the board to tease herself by looking down at the rippling water below, then turned around to climb back down. She had never had any intention of going off the board, given that she couldn't swim, but while she was climbing a line had formed behind her.

She had stood, stunned, as an older boy's face appeared at the back end of the board. "Just go already," the boy had said, irritably, adding with a sneer, "baby."

Startled and mortified, she had jumped, unthinking, belly flopped into twelve feet of water, and had to be rescued by the lifeguard, who had yelled at her while she was still spluttering and gasping on the concrete. She hadn't even gone near a public pool for a couple of years, fearing that she might encounter that lifeguard again.

The Doctor pushed aside his own plate, still with that worried smile on his face. "Can I ask you a question?"

"No." She chewed her lip. Her hands were cold. She tucked them between her knees, waiting for him to ask anyway, but he didn't. Something inside her unknotted, just a little. "Okay."

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Like what?" she stammered.

"Like a condemned prisoner looking at a hangman's noose."

There was nothing she could say that he would want to hear. "I need to go do my math now." She cleared her plate into the recycler and fled the room.

He didn't try to find her again for another couple of hours. She was hiding out in her room, looking at iCarly reruns without really watching them. He knocked three times. She considered pretending she was asleep. He would know, but she didn't think he would call her on it. "Come in," she said. He walked in the door, leaving it open. Adrenalin burned in her chest.

Her room was big enough to contain a little sitting area with two comfortable chairs and an endtable between them. Alex had been sitting in one of the chairs with the laptop she'd claimed from a storage room. The Doctor pulled up the other. "What harm to the timestream could possibly come from letting me watch a new iCarly once in a while?" she asked, mostly to see if she could distract him.

The Doctor made a noncommittal noise, then said, "The Tardis can be a bit stingy with information originating in your near future. Can I ask you a question?" Her insides twisted. He had that earnest look on his face again. She preferred him silly and evasive.

"Like I can stop you," she said.

"Well," he said, putting on his "charm the sun from behind a cloud" smile. She wasn't buying it. The smile vanished. He scrubbed his hair until it stuck straight up. "When you look at me, do you see a monster?"

"No." She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her hands around her bare toes. "I mean." She tried again. "It's not about you." He just sat there and waited, as if he had centuries. "This is ridiculous. I'm ridiculous." Her hands shook. She clamped them tighter over her own toes.

"You're not ridiculous."

She was not going to cry. If she kept looking at him, she would cry, she knew it. She got up to pace and ended up by the door, tore a sticky note off her desk, and started to shred it methodically. "I really don't want to do this...thing." Do it, she couldn't even make herself say it.

"I'm not going to make you do anything you're unwilling to do. It's your choice."

She shook her head, still with her back to him, hiding. "I don't really have a choice." She tore another thin strip of paper, rolling it between her fingers. "What if I'm not smart enough to learn everything I need to know?" She started on her second slip of neon paper, adding to the pile of curls littering the desk, the chair, her bedspread. "You're not just some knight in shiny armor riding in out of nowhere anymore. It matters what you think of me now." She forced herself to turn and look at him. "I wasn't brave before. I was only pretending."

"That's all brave is. Pretending enough so that you can do what you have to do." He laughed, not quite happily. "I do it all the time."

"What are you scared of then?" she challenged.

He didn't answer for a long time. "Losing. Worlds, people, friends. You, a bit. It matters what you think of me, too."

"I don't suppose I could just read a book and figure out everything I need to know on my own?"

He shrugged. "Just as soon as you learn to play the piano by reading a book about pianos."

Alex forced herself to walk back over to her chair. She stood behind it, not yet ready to sit down. "Maybe I'll just ask questions until you get tired of me and leave."

"Suit yourself. I can answer questions all day. And I'm not leaving."

"Why do you look human?" It was one of those things that had been bothering her for a while. "Are you wearing a human suit or something?"

A look of horror, quickly stifled, crossed his face. "No, this is just how I look."

"Isn't that kind of unlikely?"

He shrugged. "Actually, it is. Very unlikely. Curious, that, isn't it?"

Ah, the patented answer that wasn't an answer at all. "Are there aliens out there that wear human suits?"

He winced. "Yes. I've met some. Not a pleasant bunch at all."

She swallowed. "How come," she said, testing her own courage, "How come you only go silent around me?"

"Because it's a lot more work. That type of shield I usually only use when I've got to, say, sneak past someone or something that can detect a psychic field. I have to build an inverse pattern, a sort of negative of my own field, to cancel it out. I'd rather not do that all the time."

"You do a lot of sneaking past things?"

"More than perhaps I should."

"You don't really have to touch people, do you." She didn't make it a question. "Because when you're not running silent, I have to fend you off when you're across the room."

"Yes and no," he said. "Inside the Tardis, not really. Outside the Tardis, there's a lot of interference. I can trace the, well, one human word for them is worldlines, the past, present, and likely futures of everyone around me for a few hundred meters, farther for key events or people I know well. The timesense is actually the dominant facet of a Time Lord's psychic field. Telepathy is just along for the ride."

Time Lord, is that what you call yourself? Kind of pretentious. Alex nodded encouragement. "And?"

"The need to touch is more about bringing someone else inside my shields, keeping everyone else out. I can never fully let my guard down on an inhabited planet. Or even in the Tardis, when I have a passenger."

"Oh." She couldn't think of another question. She was completely stuck, staring into the abyss of his eyes again. She made herself sit down. "You win. I'm done stalling. Go ahead." She noticed her fingers twisting the hem of her makeshift dress and forced them to smooth it back out and rest on her knees.

"Go ahead nothing. You're going to do the work." He leaned forward on his elbows. "You try to contact me."

"I can't do that." She shook out her hands, rubbed the sweat off them onto the hem of her shirt.

"Just open your mind," he said, as if that were helpful.

"Do you tell other people that?"

"Not a lot, well, sometimes."

"And how's that working out for you? Because I have no idea what you mean."

The Doctor blinked, apparently stunned into silence. "That explains a lot, actually." Then his expression brightened, and he pulled the screen on the endtable onto his lap and started punching keys. He flipped the screen toward her. "What do you see?"

Blue squiggles. "It's one of those silly Magic Eye picture hidden in a picture things. You have to make your eyes go funny to see them." She stared at the picture, then imagined staring through it...she had to wait, patiently, without letting her eyes move, until the first curve popped out of the plane of the picture, then hold her attention on that line until the rest of the picture emerged. It had been fun the first twenty times or so after she'd learned how, but the pictures were really not worth the effort. "It's a sailboat," she said. "What's your point?"

"Do that." He sat back in the chair, suffused with light, but not his usual featureless brilliance. Patterns swirled inside the light. "Whenever you're ready."

She couldn't figure out what to do with her hands, and worried that if she did touch him, she would fall too hard and fast to control. There was a moment in which she felt time telescope in front of her and was reminded of standing on the diving board, feeling half naked in her new two piece bathing suit, with a line of kids behind her and nowhere to go but off the end. She let her shield fade, then fought the sensation of falling, for a second. Fall on purpose, she thought, or maybe he did, it sounded like an instruction. She was surrounded by swirling light, color, and sound now. Wait, she told herself, shoving down panic, ignoring her lurching stomach, trusting that if she lost control of herself the Doctor would catch her.

There, it was like a line, or a melody, picked out just for a moment in the swirling chaos, but it made sense. She made herself be still, pay attention to the little piece of sense in the nonsense without trying too hard. After forever, just as with the picture, everything settled down. There was an up and a down, and a Doctor side and an Alex side, though not exactly, and she could see flashes of thought and memory around her, like snapshots. She felt that if she went to touch one, she would go inside it, but she might be wrong, and she didn't want to get lost.

"I would never let you get lost."

He'd closed off a lot of himself, behind walls and doors...literally walls and doors, which kind of surprised her with their concreteness. She'd been too distracted the one other time to notice. Unlike the Doctor, she couldn't quite figure out how to speak. She wasn't sure exactly where she'd left her body. There was just too much to pay attention to at once.

"I hadn't thought of that being a problem," he said. "Time Lords have more capacity for paying attention to a lot of things at once."

Yes, we all know how terribly clever Time Lords are, she thought. Why do you bother speaking aloud?

"I think aloud all the time. Why stop now?"

Good question, she supposed. Must be hard for him to just sit there and do nothing while she got her bearings. She didn't remember there being any confused transition the last time and wondered why she had missed it.

"I shift faster than you, by a lot."

Because you're a super smart alien and I'm just a stupid human? she thought.

"Because I'm nine hundred years old and I've had a lot more practice. Can I see how you handled the situation in the flooded tunnel yesterday?" he asked, at the same time lightly touching what seemed to her to be a physical place in her mind. "I know it wasn't pleasant, but I might be able to give you some ideas in case something like that happens again." She assented, then tried to think back to the memory herself. She thought it through in slow motion, in more detail than she had been able to attend to at the time, this time with an impression of the Doctor watching over her shoulder. Trying to make her shield thicker, Emel grabbing her, the water pouring in around them and over them. "Layering your shield probably bought you an extra few seconds," he noted. "Try this." He placed a new pattern in her mind. "Takes less effort. Not now, later, you'll be able to find the image when you need it."

Am I doing okay? she thought.

"Brilliant. Listen to your heart. It's racing. This takes more out of you than you might think." She tried to find her own heartbeat, but had to be guided to it. "Now, keep your attention on your heartbeat. Find your way back." She tried to do what she was told, but had the impression she was being helped, like a little child learning to draw letters by having an adult guide her hand.

She opened her eyes, exhausted, as if she'd been running for hours. The Doctor produced a bottle of something pink and set it on the endtable.

"Drink it all."

She obeyed. It was sweet, with a faint salty, bitter aftertaste. "What is it?"

"Sports drink. I think it's Gatorade, but the label fell off."

Alex made a note to ask before consuming anything else he handed her, ever again. She wasn't sure she could stand, but she was too spun up to sleep. The Doctor headed for the door. "Are we good, then?"

"What?"

He turned back around. "Don't let yourself get all worked into a panic. Talk to me. I don't bite. Promise."

"I promise."

"Are we good, then?"

"We're good I guess," she said. He turned around to leave again. "Wait, don't leave." She didn't want to be alone. "Really? You actually want me around?" She wasn't quite sure if that note in his voice was teasing.

"I'm a little short of family right now." She clambered out of the chair. Her vision darkened for a moment, but she turned her near faint into a theatrical fling across her bed. "I want to do something normal, like watch TV or play a game. Stuff like I'd do at home."

"Do you know how to play chess?" At Alex's headshake, the Doctor bounced out of the room, returning a few moments later with a battered chess set. He pulled one of the chairs over to the edge of the bed and started placing pieces on the board. Alex rolled over onto her stomach, resting her chin on her hands.

Once the pieces were all in place, he started to point out each one. "All right, to start with, these little pieces out in front are the pawns. They only move one space at a time, just like this..."


End file.
